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Plants and Animals

The Plants and Animals VoH Application (PandA) has yet to be written. These are specifications only at this point, but about 75 percent of the underlying work has been done, so the application can be readied fairly quickly.

The initial PandA app is meant primarily for high school and college student classes under the guidance of a teacher, however, it will be open to general participation on the web.

Students each choose a plant or animal that they will represent in global discussions with other participating students. Homo Sapiens will be a valid choice. Students may think of themselves as a particular member of the species with a name they give themselves. Natural features, such as oceans, rivers, lakes, forests, deserts, mountains and the like will also be valid choices.

Each species will have its own community, where only students who have selected that species participate. For each species, there will be a corresponding twitter account, and there will also be twitter accounts for Plants, Animals. Land, Water, Air and Mother Nature. Highly rated messages will be automatically tweeted.

New messages will be released to the non-student participants for a day before they can be seen by the students. This will allow the more general web participants to mark messages as “unsuitable for minors” so they can be suppressed for the student population until reviewed by moderators.

Other issues are likely to come up. Teachers will need a way to register their students, for instance. Multiple languages will need to be handled, though we can start with an English only version.

The PandA application opens up a possible source of revenue for wildlife conservationists. With a proper non-profit middle-man, funders could give money which will then be distributed by the students to non-profit organizations of their choosing. Each student, for instance, might earn ten cents to donate for each message rated and five dollars for each message written that ends up being tweeted.